Approximately eighty percent of the current stream of letter mail is produced in the high-speed postage environment. Postage is produced at about 70,000 pieces per hour by high-speed postage machines. Typically, items such as utility bills, direct mail pieces and catalogs are processed in this manner. These items are produced on machines that are generically called inserters. Mail pieces move along a conveyor belt through the various components of the machine. Postage is applied on the mail pieces in various ways, such as permit mail or metered mail.
In the case of metered mail, at the end of the high-speed conveyor belt, there is a traditional electro-mechanical meter that applies postage to the items. A plate representing the postage value is pressed down on each mail piece to mark the postage. The postage is printed with a phosphorescent ink. The development of meter machines has not kept up with improvements in the rest of the high speed postage equipment. As a result, the meters are actually slower than the rest of the machine. In other words, the other elements the high-speed process, such as inserters, folders and stuffers, move mail faster than the traditional meter can print the required postage.
One example of a high-speed system is a manifest system. The manifest system is an enhancement to the United States Postal Service's (USPS) permit system, which allows non-unique conditions to be applied to each envelope that indicated the postage that should be paid for the envelope. The permit system simply identifies the permit holder's number and where it is being mailed from and the class of mail to be used. In the permit system, all pieces needed to be of identical weight and of an identical mail class. The pieces where then weighed to determine the total postage due. The manifesting system allows pieces of various weights and mail classes to be mixed into a single batch by applying a unique number to each mail piece. That unique number is keyed to a character code that describes the rate category, the weight of the mail piece and the postage amount for that individual piece.
The mail pieces are presented along with a document that describes each piece within the mailing, including each piece's unique number and weight, and the postage amount for each piece. This information can then be checked in a statistical fashion in order to insure that those mail pieces are actually in the permit system. This system requires inspection upon presentment of the mail to the USPS in order to assure compliance, and requires more steps and more bookkeeping than systems that use live postage.
As is well-known, postage is based on the weight of the mail items. Some types of mail, such as bills, will include a different number of pages in each piece. For example, customers who have charged a lot of purchases may have more pages in their credit card bills than customers who have made a single purchase. Additionally, some advertising inserts may be included in some customers bills, but not others. Therefore, each mail piece will have a different weight. This causes a problem with traditional meters because, in the high-speed postage environment, the meters typically need to be set up for a single postage value because the postage value cannot be changed quickly. Every piece that goes through the line needs to have the same postage value applied in the traditional high-speed mailing environment.
Other arrangements have been attempted to solve these problems, such as physically splitting the processing line to send mail pieces to multiple postage meters, wherein each meter is set at a different postage value. While this arrangement allows different postage values to be applied to different mail pieces of varying weight, this is an expensive solution that requires additional equipment, such as multiple postage meters and a mechanism to sort pieces by weight. Additionally, in this solution, the postage value options are limited by the number of meters that are installed.
Another problem with these types of systems is security. In the current environment of the USPS, there is an initiative to remove all of these traditional type printers or meters that are being used because the USPS view them as security issues. These systems have very little protection of the funds that are inside the meter itself. There are easy ways to manipulate the registers that keep the funds inside those meters. Moreover, there is a great difficulty in accounting for each piece of mail, such that the USPS cannot be sure that each piece of mail has had is postage properly paid for. Thus, running through millions of pieces of mail through these traditional meters, the USPS is viewing the usage of the meters as a huge loss of postage revenue due to the USPS.
Pitney Bowes has a version of a high speed postage meter that is fast enough to work in a high volume environment. These meters produces an indicia that is known as a digital indicia, or bar code, which encodes variable information into each postage indicia. The variable information may comprise information as to where indicia came from, how much postage has been paid for, the serial number of that meter and so forth. Thus, this provides more security, because the additional information allows the USPS (or other entity) to be able to trace mailing back to ensure that the postage has been properly paid for that piece of mail. One drawback with these systems is that they are expensive. Using one of theses systems increases the cost of mailing each envelope from fractions of a cent to one or more cents.